Q&A: Steve Alten

West Palm Beach-based author Steve Alten is no stranger to the supernatural and conspiracy thriller, having penned books on Mayan prophecies, genetic engineering and government secrecy. But his newly released 16th book, Undisclosed, may be his most ambitious yet.

Inspired in part by his own UFO sighting in 2013—which he describes in the book’s forward—as well as his extensive collaborations with renowned E.T. researcher Steven Greer, Undisclosed is the most rigorous example yet of Alten’s so-called “faction” writing style, which integrates real information into a fiction narrative. The facts, in this case, concern the mysteries and cover-ups behind the 1947 Roswell crash, its implications for a future in free energy, and a government cabal’s attempts to suppress it, all of which was reported to Greer by whistleblowers and insiders from the military-industrial complex and spun into a narrative by Alten. Bill Clinton has a speaking part, President Trump figures into the timely story, and ancillary revelations involve everything from the moon landing to the death of Marilyn Monroe, from psywar experiments to super-secret military bases.

Alten will discuss his book at a free appearance July 20 at the Wellington Barnes & Noble. In the meantime, with the 70th anniversary of the Roswell crash less than a week away, we spoke to Alten about Undisclosed and its nonfiction companion piece, written with Greer, Unacknowledged.

This book opens with your own experience of seeing unexplained craft for the first time. Would this book exist without it?

Probably not. The truth of the matter is that if you had asked me prior to that event if I believed in UFOs, I would have said, I don’t know about UFOs, but I believe there is life on other planets. Mathematically, there are billions of galaxies out there, and trillions of planets. If it was one in a million—the odds of life evolving on another planet and in our own galaxy—there would be millions of species. It was more outlandish to think we could be the only life-form in the universe.

But then when you see these ships, and they’re so majestic, just float by, and then you see them disappear into the ether … that was three days before I was supposed to meet with Dr. Greer. The things that Dr. Greer showed me over the coming years are just unbelievable. The shocking things that have gone on for 70 years since Roswell, it’s mind-boggling. Truth is definitely stranger than fiction, and in this case, I never would have been prepared for it had I not experienced that simple sighting.

This book is predicated on what you call the Disclosure Event of 2017. For those not well-versed in ufology, what do you mean by disclosure?

Disclosure means that the government discloses the truth about UFOs, the truth about extraterrestrials, the truth about the technologies that were reverse-engineered from these downed spacecraft that could change our species forever, hopefully for the good.

Does disclosure mean the president holding a press conference, or will this information come out in leaks to the media?

The first thing would be to get the information to the public, so that there’s a groundswell of public opinion about it, so that it becomes dialogue. Otherwise, it’s just swept under the rug as conspiracy theory and nonsense. If you think about it, that’s how we were raised. In a recent interview, I asked a radio host, ‘do you believe in God? And if you do believe in God, why do you believe in a creator that you have no evidence of?’ The reason is because we were taught that way.

We were also raised that if you believe in UFOs, you’re crazy. That was the government’s response, back in 1947, when these things were flying all over the skies and buzzing Air Force bases—and they still are. You have to play it up to the public that if you believe in these things, you’re crazy. What you saw was not what you saw.

Is it just wishful thinking that there will be a Disclosure Event this year, or do you have any insight that this might actually happen before the end of 2017?

Dr. Greer’s and my idea was to create this three-pronged attack, the first being the documentary and the book Unacknowledged, which go into far greater detail, which I helped him write and edited for him. Then the third part is my book, Undisclosed, which in a different format helps disseminate the truth to the public in digestible bites.

This book addresses so much—free energy, alien contact, conspiracies involving a secret government cabal. And it’s bolstered by a good deal of verified information and some conjecture about people who have died mysteriously. Have you come to believe in these ideas and the grand conspiracy to hide them, or are you personally on the fence about any of it?

It’s the difference between not seeing those UFOs and seeing them. Had I not seen them, I’d probably still be on the fence about it. Having seen it, and talked to Dr. Greer, and listened to the testimonials of his eyewitnesses, I’m 100-percent convinced it’s all true. We not only name names of people that were assassinated, but we name locations of subterranean bases. We don’t pull any punches.

Talk about your lead character, Adam Shariak, a war veteran and aerospace engineer who is covertly contracted by well-meaning officials to expose the shadow government and reveal the truth about ETs. He seems to be a surrogate for the average reader, learning of these hidden worlds with much skepticism and gradually coming around to belief.

What Adam represents to the reader is their doubt. And they’ll continue to have their doubt until they go far enough into the rabbit hole that they start believing these things, and may even be cross-referencing them on the internet. The name “Adam Shariak,” by the way, is a derivative of Shari Adamiak, who was Dr. Greer’s right-hand person, his assistant, who was killed. There were three people who were psychotronically embedded with cancer, if you can believe that. Dr. Greer was one of then, Shari was another, and then the senator, Steven Schiff, from New Mexico, who was working on investigating Roswell for them. From these extraterrestrials, we actually have the knowledge to transfer disease through wavelengths or whatever it might be. Dr. Greer was saved only because when he was hit, his dog was next to him, and the dog absorbed some of it and ended up dying of cancer.

President Trump factors into the story, at least tangentially. You must have been writing this book during the presidential campaign. Would the novel be different if Hillary Clinton had won?

Actually, the novel was written about a year earlier and edited. I had Hillary winning. I had scenes with Hillary in it, where she was arguing with Bill because she found out he was the one who met with Adam Shariak. I had to change all that and put Trump in there.

You have some powerful statements about climate change in this book, and particularly Trump’s attitude toward environmental issues. How does the environment factor into the narrative?

It’s huge, and of course, the book was written before Trump pulled us out of the Paris Accord. Climate change is the biggest thing we’re facing as far as a threat to our civilization and survival. The fact that people have made this a political statement is ridiculous. It’s not a political issue. It’s a survival issue. But they’re tying it to the livelihoods of the fossil fuel industry, who themselves realize we need to have these rules, or we’re going to choke off the planet. So for President Trump to put up a gauntlet in front of climate talks is absolute insanity.

The threat of climate change is not just the Earth heating up. It’s that when that ice melts, where is it going to go? That’s freshwater. It’s not saltwater. And that freshwater, if it inundates the North Atlantic Current, will send us into an ice age, because it will stop the conveyer belt of warmth that has kept our planet warm. That’s how ice ages happen. We have evidence of that. Once it happens, we’re in trouble.

Bill Clinton has a significant speaking part in your story, using some old-fashioned spy techniques to deliver information to Adam. How do you think he would feel about his portrayal in this book, and his role in the narrative?

He would first deny that he had been briefed by Dr. Greer. But when he goes on Jimmy Kimmel and pretends that these things haven’t happened, he’s doing that out of fear, because he doesn’t want to be assassinated. So you sort of understand that. The same thing with President Obama: He was threatened as well.

I’ve seen Obama and Clinton discuss this issue—and you never see presidents more uncomfortable than when they’re asked about this issue.

And kudos to Jimmy Kimmel for asking the questions. You asked if 2017 is the year of disclosure. It can be. If these books do well, and the documentary does well, then it enables Jimmy Kimmel to invite Dr. Greer on as a guest, and then you are mainstream. That’s how disclosure happens. It’s not going to be the president who comes forward. The truth of the matter is, if Trump came forward and said, ‘There’s a new energy source, zero-point energy, and we’re going to bring it out, and it was reverse-engineered from UFOs,’ this is not the guy who can say that. He’s the boy crying wolf.

One of the bombshells revealed in these books is that Marilyn Monroe was murdered, because of knowledge she gained from her relationship with Kennedy.

Yeah, pillow talk about Roswell, and that he’d seen the alien bodies and the ships. She decided that that’s how she’d get him at back for dumping her.

That she would reveal that information?

Yeah, because it happened at a time when both JFK and Bobby Kennedy had broken off their relationships with her. So she was pissed off. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and she decided this is what she would go public with, to teach them a lesson.

I’d never heard that before these books. Have you or Greer received blowback from that?

Not at all, because the document is in Unacknowledged—the CIA document that shows right there that she said it.

Sections of this book begin with flash-forwards several decades into the future, and this is where you most get to flex your sci-fi muscles to create a world quite different than this one. What’s your objective with these sequences?

I needed to show the world that this is what it could be. If you want the public to move the world to where it needs to be, first they need to know where it’s going. I wanted to paint the picture that with zero-point energy, this is the way the world can be: no pollution, no poverty, no hunger, jobs for everybody, nobody worried about having enough money to pay for this and that. It’s an entirely different world, and I didn’t even get into travel across the star systems. We already have the ability to “bring E.T. home.” That’s a pretty powerful statement from Ben Rich, former CEO of Lockheed’s Skunk Works. That means we can travel the stars.

Another shocking thing I learned is that the ETs have quarantined us, because we are not spiritually mature enough—we’re still trying to kill ourselves. And until we get over that, we’re going to remain quarantined. All this talk about exploring Mars … they’re not going to let us go. There’s reasons the Apollo moon missions we’re canceled, and that these Mars things never got off the ground, and that we don’t have space hotels on the moon. We’ve got the technology to do that.

Do you feel that the mainstream media is asleep at the wheel on the issues you discuss in this book?

No, I think, like Dr. Greer says, the CIA controls every mainstream media outlet—newspapers, magazines, TV. They control it all. If a UFO landed on the Capitol lawn, don’t expect to see the story in the newspaper the next day.

See Alten read from Undisclosed at 7 p.m. July 20 at Barnes & Noble, 10500 W. Forest Hill Blvd., Wellington. The book is also available now at amazon.com.

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